SpaceX’s Falcon 9 returns to flight with a trio of Starlink launches

After Thursday’s green light from the FAA to resume launches, SpaceX took no time to try to catch up on the last few week’s lack of Starlink missions. Using all three of its Falcon 9 launch sites, the company launched a total of 67 Starlink satellites into orbit.

On July 11, SpaceX suffered a failure of its Falcon 9 second stage during a circularization burn. This caused the loss of all 20 Starlink satellites that were deployed into a lower than planned orbit. Thirteen of those 20 satellites featured direct-to-cell hardware for use by T-Mobile.

After reviewing SpaceX’s post mishap investigation, the FAA cleared SpaceX to continue launching. However, SpaceX only implemented a short term fix by removing the sensor, another fix could come in the future still.

SpaceX launched its return to flight Falcon 9 mission early Saturday morning from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. As expected, the launch took place without issue and deployed its satellites into their designated orbit.

A repeat of that mission took place almost 24 hours later from SLC-40, a few miles south at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Both of these missions used boosters for their 17th time. These high numbers are starting to get normal as SpaceX continues to push what each Falcon 9 booster is capable of.

The third and final Falcon 9 launch of the weekend lifted off from SLC-4E on the West Coast at Vandenberg Space Force Base. Just a few hours before the previous mission, that completed SpaceX’s triple play of three Falcon 9 launches from its three launch sites in one weekend.

SpaceX will be back later in the upcoming week with more launches as it hopes to make up for lost time to hit its 148 mission goal for 2024. Coming up in August we’ll see two resupply missions to the ISS, NASA’s Crew-9 flight, and the much anticipated Polaris Dawn mission, which hopes to complete the first commercial spacewalk using Dragon and specially designed SpaceX suits.

So far this year SpaceX has launched 76 times, including Starship, with an average launch rate of one launch every 2.84 days.